Smoke on the Water
by demonegg
Summary: In a single moment, her life had been reduced to ashes and smoke.


_I do not own FFVII or any of its characters. The title refers to a song by Deep Purple. Also, this is all from Tifa's POV, set before or during the game, but it may be embellished or anachronistic at some points. Consider it a side effect of trauma and memory loss. _

* * *

The name was Seventh Heaven, and it smelled of smoke.

Had she been here before? Perhaps.

It was hard to tell. All the buildings corroded the same. All the patrons drowned in the same liquids.

A man about thirty-five slumped at the counter nursing a drink, a whiskey, atop a tottery old barstool which rocked and writhed over the sludge and dust on the floor. Three-days' stubble clumped along his jowls, where heavy creases folded under, sagged, and sapped liquor and sweat onto the lacquered top where he stamped out a thin excuse for a cigarette under a neon fluorescence.

The man was dying.

Maybe she should've found the bar's name ironic. But she didn't.

Instead she swept the dust and dirt into a pan, into the broadening fingerwidth cracks along the walls, and got her second job.

Then, she made her first drink.

XXXX

It was dinner time at the bar.

For months, everything was tainted by steel and smoke. But nonetheless, she had taken up cooking one day, primarily out of necessity: good food was scarce between a grizzly of a man, and his two more cuddly companions, a string bean in glasses, who could pack away an astonishing amount when brainstorms struck, and a three-year-old who consumed her weight in peanut butter and jelly and choco-chocobo cookies. She sizzled and fried, shaked and baked, whisked and whipped until buckles came undone and conversation devolved into moans and grunts. In the morning, between mouthfuls of blueberry muffins and buttermilk pancakes, they'd tell her it was her best meal yet, I can't imagine life before ya, Teef.

And she'd almost smile, barely, and a niggling warmth would creep into her chest, until she remembered the heat of the empty sky and the lights below, like falling up into a well. And how she swung an expanse of steel, felt its silver bullet tracks race across her chest, and she fell, away from that well, while three billion sparks smoldered in its pits.

The fires had died, as fires always do, but the embers would sear and glow for the next trillion years.

XXXX

Her first time had almost been quick and painful. A couple of two-fifty shots for the pretty lady and a half-hour break, and she could have been fully admitted into slum living. That dusky night, a burn hissed on her wrist when his cigarette seared the skin alongside a pressed kiss to her palm. The gesture hadn't been necessary. Romance was a memory, a freak-show exhibit of the past when she had believed in blue skies and bluer eyes and the way water tickled along her spine during scorching summer days when she leaned against a rotted well. But despite her unbelief in the show, perfidy still snagged her body, wormed into her soul, and she laid her knuckles across his temple before his hands could begin their explorations along her lower back. Like a shot in the dark she fled, forced herself to swallow the guilt, hide the evidence.

His bruise would fade; but the scar marked her free-to-return, a 'Come back and see us, Miss.' She wouldn't. She would learn to conceal it under dishpan hands and a fighter's leather gloves.

A fighter: she would call herself a fighter, a firefighter, for fires would spark between her fingers. Reactors would burn, and with them, her own memories until the letters she had never the gumption to pen curled at their edges and the ink yellowed into filigree tendrils of dreams and nothingness.

Then ocean eyes would sink into black, blind and closed, and she could stop drowning a betrayed childhood in them. One where he followed, and she never looked back, and he left, and she stayed.

One where he died and she pressed on.

XXXX

The liquid screamed against the shredded membrane of her throat, weeping and wailing when she couldn't. So she did it again and again until it shut up.

Barret hadn't scolded her too harshly. The first time someone dies is rough. He tossed back his own vitriolic, a clack on his teeth and a clunk on the counter, before bowling down unconscious on the couch.

He hadn't scolded because he hadn't known what had happened, how she had almost broken, how she had almost failed. But they'd all been shaken up after their first job. They had come back in the dark and trembled alone in beer and blood.

They had to go at night.

The fires always burned brighter then.

XXX

"Tifa! Tifa!"

"What is it, sweetie?"

"I lost the bermette you gave me."

"Barrette. How?" Sniffles and sighs slipped against her shirt as she cradled the girl to her chest.

"I was playing, and it fell into a big pipe." _A group of laughing children skip over some rocks, and plip-plop, into the canyon a young girl and a spiky-blond straggler went. _

"Well it's probably in another sector by now." _I'm going to Midgar in the spring. I'll show them._

"Is that why you're dirty?" she chuckled, thumbing a speck of dirt off the tip of Marlene's button nose. _A brush of fingers smoothed away the smudges on her face: a mirage, dissolved into a beeping heart monitor and the starched sheets of a foreign bed. _

"I wanted to find it." _You came for me. _

"Imma sorry, Tifa."

"Me, too."

XXXX

How many years since she had last seen him? Had he known about his mother? He must have.

_A yellow memo with perforated edges sits crumpled on the table next to a bottle of beer and a sword. He swallows, the lump in his throat lobbing up down, up down until it steadies, and he spins the silvered blade onto his back for the next mission._

_Somewhere between his apartment and his destination, he fleetingly thinks of a small dark-haired girl and a well. How he had jumped down, turned to taxi her home; but then the fires would rage and the well would collapse over her, entombing her forever within the embers' heated gaze. _

_Asphyxiated._

XXXX

They'd gotten new glasses for the bar-- a real steal, Barret had triumphed. Procured in the Wall Market square from an elderly shopkeep clad in a wide-pocketed smock, who had been forced to sell his livelihood for a few gil to heat the apartment for his dying wife. The frosted wares ebbed and swirled in the glow of the mako lights, the glass rippling over itself, dipping in, before pooling out to a wide lip. They were too pretty for cheap ale, but she bought them anyways. That evening a casual flick of the wrist topped them off with alcohol and slid them down the warped counter to waiting hands. The finicky, coruscate neon signs dulled in their reflections to dirty and brown, as the mugs collected booze and fingerprints.

No matter how many times she scrubbed, she couldn't efface the foggy yellow umbra or the hairline crack fracturing the L-twist in the handle of glass.

XXXX

Had she loved him?

She wondered, sometimes.

For a while, he was all she thought about. In Midgar, he was all she looked for.

They had a well, and a promise, and a future.

The well had collapsed and the water burned red. The cinders smoldered under her boots when she raced for the reactor. She was struck down with a splinter in her sole.

She didn't think that, when they're both good and dead, he would recognize her in the lifestream. Not under the stench of beer and smoke, with the scar so visible on her wrist.

XXXX

She walked to the train station. The 5:45 to Sector 4 was late, and bodies in mismatched hats and threadbare shirts plugged the sidewalk with their mass. She stood aside at one end, then passed through when the train started with a whistle and a whoosh and belched dirt and smog and an old newspaper over the ramshackle, shoving crowd.

Footsteps marched away, and she was left alone.

A few feet away, a man moaned.

"Hey! Get up!" she called to him.

There was no reason to venture into the shadows.

XXXX

She had found those eyes on that walk from the market. Curled up near the wall where the rats gnawed what the runoff didn't drench.

Had his eyes always been that color? Or had her imagination taken flight and veiled them in haze?

A fire raged within his forehead and briefly she wondered which of his memories were being burned.

Too many, she thought, of his and of hers.

XXXX

An arm haphazard over her shoulder, she dragged him to the bar to nurse him back to health.

Blackened fingers brushed against a solitary blond wisp as she laid him on the bed. A burden relieved, or assumed?

No matter. They had memories. She would cling to their ashes.

XXXX

She smeared the memories on her face like warpaint, an 'X' on each cheek; 2 Xs: one for the past, one for the future. There had been the same, a scar on that SOLDIER's face, too. And probably one across his chest. Did that make three, or four? How many Xs would have been in the paper? Thirty? A hundred?

Nibelheim, Population: 30X? 100X. Give or take a few.

The number didn't matter so much when bodies counted as dust.

XXXX

He looked at her the same as he once had, she thought. There was a glimmer of recognition or need or affection in those eyes; then: impenetrable fog, a graying or a greening, before they cleared and he grimaced a smirk.

"Sleep well, Cloud?" Dead still, and tormented, that one.

"Next to you, who wouldn't?"

She blushed and smiled, and he moved up the stairs past her, unawares.

A little blond boy, bloody from a fight, percolated into her consciousness and she wondered if he ever had gloated when he won.

XXXX

He was back, and she smiled.

She _smiled_. A real honest-to-goodness smile.

In his hand, he clutched a pale flower, for her. She hadn't seen one since the craggy hills of Nibelheim still glimmered green in the spring and the shadows mimed charades of black and gold over the sprigs' glossy surfaces. Since before the houses stood bare bones and rotting, before the trees remained as stark spears skewering the sky; since before the fire.

She accepted it graciously, and his eyes glistened honest and pure as a mountain stream before he scratched the back of his head and stumbled away.

The smoke rolled back in droves, but for a moment, the fires had dwindled, smothered under the liquid stillness of his eyes.

She loved him for that.


End file.
